November 2004

Is any unmanned spacecraft a robotic probe? You might think so, given the tasks the hardware has to perform to accomplish a given scientific mission, but a more precise definition came out of the European Space Agency’s ASTRA 2004 workshop, held in the Netherlands early in November. Says Gianfranco Visentin, head of ESA’s Automation and […]

I’ve run into a fascinating discussion on American Enterprise Online titled “Look Heavenward?” — it’s a collection of articles whose description on the magazine’s table of contents, “The pros and cons of spending more on manned space exploration,” is wildly insufficient to describe its range. The most interesting of the pieces here consists of three […]

From the polymath Freeman Dyson, in an essay called “Extraterrestrials,” which appears in his collection Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979, pp. 210-211): “Given plenty of time, there are few limits to what a technological society can do. Take first the question of colonization. Interstellar distances look forbiddingly large to human colonists, […]

New infrared studies of the dust around three young stars lend credence to the idea that Earth-like planets may circle other stars. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), a team of astronomers studied the proto-planetary disks around the stars, homing in on the inner region of the discs. The results: the […]

An asteroid called 2004 TP1 came within 13 LD of Earth on November 2 — LD stands for ‘lunar distance,’ and is the average distance between the Earth and the Moon (238,855 miles, or 384,401 kilometers). Asteroid 2004 RZ164 will come even closer, at 7 LD on December 8. Both objects are considered Potentially Hazardous […]

Searching the Internet has always been dicey, given the wide range of sites you’re likely to pull up on any topic, and the varying degrees of quality each may bring. Google has done good work in restricting Web results — its ‘site-specific search,’ for example, allows you to search within a universe of sites related […]

Those of us with still fresh memories of Voyager 2’s encounter with Neptune in 1989 find it gratifying that both Voyager probes are still returning good science. It’s even more remarkable that the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes are still in the thick of things, but anomalies in their journeys beyond the orbit of Pluto […]

Microlensing Planet Finder is a proposed mission that would use the gravitational lensing effect to achieve extraordinary detection capabilities. As presented in The Microlensing Planet Finder: Completing the Census of Extrasolar Planets in the Milky Way (PDF warning), MPF could find planets down to 0.1 Earth mass, in locations as close as 0.7 AU to […]

From the remarkable H. G. Wells, in a 1902 lecture at London’s Royal Institution: “It is conceivable that some great unexpected mass of matter should presently rush upon us out of space, whirl sun and planets aside like dead leaves before the breeze, and collide with and utterly destroy every spark of life upon this […]

A new project called PlanetQuest will soon offer a way to get involved personally with the hunt for extrasolar planets. The idea is to use the power of distributed computing, as the hugely influential SETI@home project has already done, letting people run data analysis software as a screensaver that operates whenever their computer is idle. […]

Charter

In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For the last seven years, this site has coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation, and now serves as the Foundation's news forum. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image: Marco Lorenzi).

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